books

screenplays

Exile (full-length drama) Finalist, WriteMovies; Quarterfinalist, Fade-In.
LJ lives in a U . S. of A., with a new Three Strikes Law: first crime, rehab; second crime, prison; third crime, you’re simply kicked out – permanently exiled to a designated remote area, to fend for yourself without the benefits of society. At least he used to live in that new U. S. of A. He’s just committed his third crime.

What Happened to Tom (full-length drama) Semifinalist, Moondance.
This guy wakes up to find his body’s been hijacked and turned into a human kidney dialysis machine – for nine months.

Aiding the Enemy (short drama 15min)
When Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.

Bang Bang (short drama 30min) Finalist, Gimme Credit; Quarter-finalist, American Gem.
When a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?

Foreseeable (short drama 30min)
An awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?

Two Women, Road Trip, Extraterrestrial (full-length comedy)
When an independent activist and her frustrated office temp buddy embark on a quest for a chocolate bar, they pick up a hitchhiking extraterrestrial who’s stopped on Earth to ask for directions. They help her get the information she needs – and discover it’s easier to get a gun in this country than a little scientific knowledge – and decide to go with her. To become chocolate bartenders.

Boston Legal: Bang Bang (spec script) Semifinalist,Scriptapalooza.

Balls (short mockumentary 10min)
A hilarious mockumentary about men playing with balls

Here Comes the Bride (5min)
You’ll never get married again.

Let Me Entertain You (5min)
Is it a slippery slope from screen idol to snuff film?

Take Care of Your Mom While I’m Gone (3-5min)
She’s an adult. She needs a ten-year-old to take care of her?

My Life in Danger (short drama 3-5min)
When does attempted rape warrant self-defence of deadly force?

Size Matters (3-5min)
What if women were the taller sex? Ask any short man.

I am Eve (10min)
An examination exposing the irrationality and injustice of Eve’s role in Judaeo-Christianity.

If Then (5-10 min)
The end of our lives as we know them. Can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

Crime of Passion (short drama 3-5min)
The perfect solution to crimes of “passion”

Minding Our Own Business (20 min)
A collection of skits (including “The Price is Not Quite Right,” “Singin’ in the (Acid) Rain,” “Adverse Reactions,” “The Band-Aid Solution,” and “See Jane. See Dick.”) with a not-so-subtle environmental message

The Missing Link (short comedy 3-5min)
Two women and an alien enter a bar…

The fact that ‘you’ claim porn doesn’t harm women is proof that it does. Because such a claim indicates that you are so accustomed to seeing women sexually subordinated you think there’s nothing wrong with it. Such a claim proves that that porn has skewed your perceptions so much you actually believe the women are enjoying, asking for, whatever it is you see. (They’re pretending, asshole. They’re acting. According to some guy’s fantasy script. And they’re doing so because they’re getting paid.)

Such a claim also proves you haven’t read the research: for example, compared to those who did not watch porn, men who watched porn were more likely to have aggressive and hostile sexual fantasies, more likely to say that women enjoy forced sex, less likely to be bothered by rape and slashing, and more likely to consider women subordinate and submissive.

The research also indicates that males are starting to watch porn as young as eleven these days.

Given the relative vulnerability of men to sexual assault (all it takes to disable them is a swift forceful kick, or, at closer quarters, a good grab, pull, twist – almost anything, really) (whereas women have to be partially undressed and then immobilized), it’s surprising that we hear far more often about rape than – well, we don’t even have a special name for it. Testicular battery?

Since most women are physically capable of such an assault, the reason must be some psychological social inhibition. And, of course, this is so. Girls are not permitted, encouraged, or taught to fight; boys are. All three. Women are socialized to see men as their protectors, not their enemies. Men are – well, this is the interesting bit: men used to be socialized to see women as in need of protection, and so would never dream of raping them (well, okay, they’d dream of it – perhaps often and in technicolor – but there was a strong social stigma against assaulting the fair sex: boys were shamed if they ever hit a girl, and if you ever hit your wife, let alone another woman, well what kind of man are you?), but feminism got rid of such patronizing chivalry.

And rightly so. Unfortunately, it has yet to make its replacement, self-defence, as commonplace.

There’s another problem. We’re afraid that if we hurt them, they’ll come back (when they can walk again) and kill us. Which is why women’s self-defence should include a small tranquilizer gun.

(‘Course they might still come back and kill us. After all, to be decommissioned by a woman! It would be a new kind of honor killing…)

Which means the best solution may be to just kill him first.

(And given the very real possibility that your rapist is HIV+, since he’s apparently not monogamous and/or in the habit of using a condom, it may not just be rape, but murder—in which case you’re justified in doing just that.)

Sure, women should be allowed to be surrogates. We all do work with our bodies, some of us also include our minds in the deal (some of us are allowed to include our minds in the deal), so why not? As long as they get paid for service rendered.

Being a surrogate is sort of like being an athlete. You have to be and stay physically healthy, for the duration: you have to eat and drink the right stuff, and not eat or drink the wrong stuff; you have to get the right amount of physical activity. And so on. It’s important. Use during pregnancy of illegal drugs (such as crack cocaine and heroin) as well as legal drugs (such as alcohol and nicotine) can cause, in the newborn, excruciating pain, vomiting, inability to sleep, reluctance to feed, diarrhoea leading to shock and death, severe anaemia, growth retardation, mental retardation, central nervous system abnormalities, and malformations of the kidneys, intestines, head and spinal cord (Madam Justice Proudfoot, “Judgement Respecting Female Infant ‘D.J.”; Michelle Oberman, “Sex, Drugs, Pregnancy, and the Law: Rethinking the Problems of Pregnant Women who use Drugs”). Refusal of fetal therapy techniques (such as surgery, blood infusions, and vitamin regimens) can result in respiratory distress, and various genetic disorders and defects such as spina bifida and hydrocephalus (Deborah Mathieu, Preventing Prenatal Harm: Should the State Intervene?)

It’s not just an enthusiastic spillover of violence and aggression. The act of sexual intercourse is too specific, too far removed from the other acts of wartime violence and aggression. Shooting a person twenty-five times instead of once or twice would be such a spillover; forcing your penis or something else into a woman’s vagina is not. Furthermore, war rape is often not a spontaneous, occasional occurrence; apparently it’s quite premeditated and systematic.

And it’s not, or not just, a matter of ethnic cleansing. If men truly wanted to eradicate the other culture, (and if they believed ethnicity was genetic), they’d just kill the women along with the men. (Women are killed, but as I understand it, they’re usually raped first.) (Or, sometimes, after.) (And men are castrated, but not nearly as often as women are raped.)

And if they truly wanted to increase their own numbers, they’d hang around and see that the kid reached maturity. (Raped women are sometimes kept prisoner until the child is born – but unless the kid is subjected to specific and exclusive cultural conditioning, how is their purpose achieved? They’d have to look after the kids themselves for ten years.) (Which is unlikely.)

And it’s not, or not just, a property crime against the enemy. If men sought merely to destroy their enemy’s property, they’d, again, simply kill their women and children, along with their livestock, before or after they burned their houses. (Unless, of course, they wanted to confiscate their property – in which case, they’d enslave the women rather than rape them.)

I used to think that the problem with rape was that women weren’t being explicit – they weren’t actually saying no, partly because men weren’t actually asking. Perhaps because there’s (still?) something shameful about sex that makes people reluctant to come right out and talk about it. Or maybe that would destroy the romance. Whatever.

As soon as I discovered I Blame the Patriarchy, I thought “I have found the mothership.” Alas, almost immediately, it powered down. Since I loved the discussion as much as Twisty’s brilliant posts, I decided to set up a new island for the blametariat: Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist.

Unfortunately, unwittingly, I declared, in addition to the ‘No Dudes’ rule, a ‘No MtFs’ rule. It seemed logical. The reason for the first was to minimize dudely mansplaining, and I reasoned that MtFs, having similarly been raised to be men, would be almost as likely to feel and exhibit that ‘entitlement’. Little did I know.

The rule was met mostly with disapproval, so I posted about the issue in order to open discussion on the matter. But the matter has been discussed to death on IBTP (I realized this later—there’s one thread there with 772 comments), so posting about it on HYIAF is just inflammatory. (And upending a barrel of worms on the beach is not a way to attract people.) So I decided to move it here. Because it’s an important issue and should, therefore, be discussed. By everyone.

So, what follows: my original rules (for HYIAF, not this site), my discussion-opening post (excerpts), and then (most of) my explanation (for a revision to the rules).Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Canadian Criminal Code, (self-induced) intoxication is no defence against charges of assault (33.1): if you’re drunk, you’re still able to form the general intent to commit said assault.

And yet, with regard to the sub-category of sexual assault, belief that someone is consenting is cancelled if that someone is intoxicated (273.1(2)): if you’re drunk, you can’t consent to sex.

So if you’re drunk, you’re capable of forming the intent to assault, but you’re not capable of forming the intent to have sex? Given that it’s mostly men who do the assaulting, and it’s mostly women who do the consenting (and given, it’s my guess, that the lawmakers had men in mind for 33.1 and women in mind for 273.1(2)), is this some sort of ‘protect the weaker sex’ double standard?

Hey, if we expect men to foresee the effects of alcohol and to be responsible for their behavior while under its influence, we should expect the same of women. Read the rest of this entry »

Suppose John Smith makes biochem cubes – biological-chemical cubes about one metre by one metre with an input for resources required for sustenance and an output for unusable processed resources. Why does John Smith make biochem cubes? Good question. Truth be told, they’re unlikely to make the world a better place. And he doesn’t sell them.

Should we make allowances for John Smith with regard to money (salary, income tax, subsidies, etc.)? After all, he has, let’s say, ten biochem cubes to support. If they are to stay alive, he needs to provide sustenance. He needs a bigger house. More electricity. More food.

Should we encourage his ‘hobby’? Perhaps consider it respectable, or a rite of passage to maturity?

Or should we censure it? Because once his biochem cubes become ambulatory, the rest of us have to go around them in one way or another. And when we’re both dead, his ecological footprint will have been at least ten times mine. (More, if the biochem cubes he made go out and make other biochem cubes.)

I’m so bloody sick and tired of men who assume center stage is for them. The way the movie ends, and most of the way it plays out, it’s about the dad, about how he can’t deal with his failure to protect his daughter.

Mom’s not quite so important, apparently, despite her greater empathy with the whole experience: not only is she too beating herself up over her failure as a parent, for, after all, she’s as much the girl’s parent, but also she must surely be saying to herself ‘It could’ve been me — at 13.’

In a rape trial, that the woman was walking alonein a parkat night has been considered relevant – presumably it’s a mitigating circumstance: the accused can be excused for thinking she wanted it if she was walking alone in a park at night.

What!? Why? Why is it that a woman walking alone in a park at night is understood – by men – to be implying consent to sex with any and all men?

Are parks designated sex zones? I suppose in a sense they are. Lovers often meet there for clandestine encounters. Yeah, for consensual clandestine encounters.

Okay, but parks at night are also popular mugging zones, perhaps because of the poor lighting which makes escape easier in the event they are policed. Okay, but a woman walking alone in a park at night is more at risk for rape than for purse-snatching.

So why is a woman walking alone – ah, is that it? A woman unaccompanied by a man is unowned? Up for grabs? Literally?